Category Archives: gardening

Fun and games

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This weekend we’ve had our share of fun and games. Yesterday the weather was cool and rainy but today it was perfect: sunny and in the high 60s. p10501251.jpg In addition to getting another van, which was exciting enough on its own, we made a trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden along with 10 million other people (or so it appeared) to see the Spring blooms. p1050142.jpg Cohen was a real stinker the whole time, running away when he was told to stay put, climbing on things he wasn’t supposed to, stepping in the flower beds, and on and on. Not sure what was wrong with him; maybe he was just more excited than usual. Brinley, on the other hand, was pretty quiet and meek the whole time. She has been unwell for a few days now with fever and sore throat so it’s no wonder. She slept on the way to the gardens and then sort of kept behind everyone else as we walked everywhere. Even though the place was crawling with people, more than we had ever seen before, it was worth the trip. The Spring flowers were gorgeous, especially the tulips. p10501281.jpg We went on some walkways that led out into the lagoon a little bit and were amused to discover a great big ‘ol carp looking for us to feed it, surrounded by a large school of bluegills. (I wish I had had my fishing pole to catch those bluegills!) p1050161.jpg Overall it was a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. On our way home we stopped and ate a nice meal at Chipotle’s. Click here to see the full set of photos from the trip.

Tomatoes and Tommy Makem

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Last night was special because I was able to pick and eat the very first ripe tomatoes of the season from our small garden.  The plant that is furthest along in terms of ripe tomatoes is the ‘Lemon Boy’ variety, which is a yellow tomato.  Keegan and Michele agreed with me that it tasted very delicious, a milder, less acidic flavor than many of the red varieties.

Also yesterday it was announced that Tommy Makem had died.  Many of you may know who he was, but some of you may not.  He was a member of the Irish folk music group known as ‘The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.’  I’m not sure how it started but in my family, we grew up listening to this group and some other, similar groups of Irish musicians.  I have a strong affinity for Irish folk music as a result.  Many of the piano pieces I like to play best are Irish folk music, including pieces they are known to have sung and played.  Tommy and the Clancy Brothers were incredibly talented and their music will always be a favorite of mine.

Ugh, it’s August already

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People say this all the time, but…Man, this summer has gone by fast! I’m not thrilled that it’s August already.  Somehow I’ve never gotten over the feeling that August brought to me when I was still going to school.  Whenever I see those dreaded words — Back to School Sale — plastered all over stores, I feel like Doom has drawn closer.  I never liked going to school, obviously :-)

I certainly can’t complain about the summertime weather; it’s been wonderfully mild, at least where I live.  I associate favorite foods with different seasons of the year.  Summer brings to mind fresh cantaloupe, watermelon, real tomatoes that come from the garden, and sweet corn.  Last night Michele made sweet corn for supper along with some fresh sliced tomatoes and Spanish rice.  She had just bought the vegetables at a nearby farmstand.  There are lots of them dotted around the countryside around us.  The corn was delicious.

The past few days have been a little rough because I haven’t been feeling well.  I’m better now.  Thankfully, Michele’s health has been pretty good for a while and we just hope it lasts.

It is crunch time for Michele and me in terms of deciding whether to push ahead with homeschooling for the little ones, especially Tristan.  And there seem to be more than the usual number of details to settle for Keegan for entering his sophomore year.  I just about choked when I learned that his school fees total about $500.

After reading it through a second time, Keegan lent me the last Harry Potter book to read shortly before noon yesterday.  I finished it at midnight last night.  I wasn’t sure, to be honest, whether I really wanted to read it or not.  It wasn’t because I was afraid Harry might end up dead, but more because I always hate to see the end of any good book series.  I needn’t have worried, though, because overall it was a very good and fitting end to the whole series.  I don’t have to worry any more that someone will spill the beans about critical plot details because I’ve read it all, and I enjoyed it.  In the last few chapters there were a few minor plot details that caused me to scratch my head but they didn’t matter.  One of the marks of a great book or book series is that you want to read it (or them) all over again, and that is certainly true of the Harry Potter books.  I want to go back and re-read them all, and also watch the movies once more.

A gardening weekend

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I haven’t been having very productive weekends of late. Usually I am slow to wake up and quick to go back to sleep, much to the chagrin of my wife and kids ;-) This weekend, however — particularly Saturday — I got something accomplished that I’ve wanted to do for a long time: I planted an herb and vegetable garden.

Some time ago I bought 2x12s to make two raised beds, each 4′ x 8′. I tried, and failed, to put them together in a sturdy fashion. Fortunately Keegan succeeded in securing them and with help from Michele, got the frames installed in the backyard in the spot I had chosen. He also filled in part of the top soil I had bought. Saturday, with his help, I was able to complete the whole job including dumping the rest of the 50 bags of topsoil into each garden bed.

Earlier that day, we visited a couple of nearby nurseries. (One of the many nice things about where we live is that everywhere you turn, there are nurseries with tons of variety of things to buy.) We bought some nice tomato plants, and lots of herbs including basil, French tarragon, yarrow, lavender, thyme, chives, bronze fennel, and cilantro. We also bought several plants of columbine and coreopsis — the latter is a beautiful, blood red color rather than the usual bright or pale yellow. Then we planted a row of sunflowers as well.

I am really pleased with the results. The garden space is small but manageable, and I especially look forward to harvesting lots of yummy, homegrown tomatoes along with fresh basil. In a few weeks I also will plant some additional crops for a fall harvest (e.g. lettuce, beans, peas).

In the meantime, the window boxes planted about a month ago are doing extremely well and we’ve added several hanging baskets with impatiens vinca to the front deck. For my birthday, my mother bought me several nice perennials that need to be planted, too. And we bought two orandas for our small pond.

A trip to Milaeger’s

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Yesterday, the weather was perfect, sunny and not too hot. We decided to make a trip to Racine, WI to buy plants at Milaeger’s Gardens. It is about an hour’s drive and well worth it. The kids were all restless and ill-behaved but we still managed to get several nice window boxes and a nice assortment of plants to go in them. On the way home we stopped at a nearby Wal-Mart to pick up potting soil and a small pond kit.

I installed the window boxes on our front deck and planted everything while Michele went to Target to get a few outdoor chairs plus a table. Then I set up the pond. We need to get some more potted plants besides our nice Norfolk Island pine to complete things but still the deck is transformed already.

Michele and I decided to do all of this as our combined Mother’s Day and Father’s Day presents to each other.

Procrastination

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I derived a lot of enjoyment from reading an article (available to subscribers only) in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic of procrastination. Misery loves company, I guess, because I felt comforted by the author’s description of his life of always being late with some project or another. My thoughts as I read about his techniques for not getting done what he should have already completed were something like: “Wow, he could be describing me.” I have failed, over and over and over again, to make writing deadlines. And yet I am tempted to say Yes again and again when asked to do this or that writing project. There is some weird psychological explanation here that fails me at the moment. Getting back to the article in The Chronicle, I thought the author summed things up nicely when he wrote:

“The best advice I ever heard is that life is what we do when we are avoiding something else. There are already too many books chasing too few readers, and, perhaps, the best thing for most us to do is take some time to play with our kids, talk to our students and colleagues, cultivate our gardens, and live well.”

Amen.

A good weekend

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Thanks to having yesterday off (it was Columbus Day here in the U.S.), we enjoyed a longer-than-usual weekend. Rather than try to finish unpacking boxes from the move and clean up the general mess, we decided to try to do some fun things. Saturday we visited a Japanese market called Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights and enjoyed the sense that we were visiting that country. We picked up some red bean cakes and miso soup mix as well as some other things. It was quite stressful to shop there with four children in a very crowded store. Still, it was fascinating and worth the trip. Michele and I agreed that next time we go, we should pick a day that is less busy and preferably, sans kids. Sunday I went to church and then afterward, we drove up to Lake Geneva, just across the border in Wisconsin. Yesterday we decided to visit the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Much to their surprise, the kids really enjoyed it. The weather was nearly perfect for the trip, sunny but cool. I’ll add photos from the gardens to my Flickr account soon but in the meantime, I loaded some new photos of the kids taken over the weekend by Michele and me with our new digital camera.

What to do on a Saturday

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Today is another in a string of beautiful weather days. The sun is shining, the temperature is in the upper 60s/lower 70s, and spring flowers are blooming. It is nice to see cheerful daffodils and forsythia shrubs in bloom. The lawn is a mess, though, needing the first mowing of the season. I found out that one of the tires on the old John Deere is flat, so I hope I can get that taken off and fixed at the local tire shop before it closes. The wheels on our garden wagon are also flat. There are big piles of brush in our yard that need to be moved to the back, put in a big pile, and burned. The gardens are a mess as well. It looks like we live in Hicksville. Sigh. Keegan is coming home soon from an overnight stay at a friend’s house. I hope he had a good time. He deserves some time away from the stresses and strains of life here at our house. I expect that he’ll be pretty wiped out, though, because he and his friend promised to stay up to all hours of the night, playing video games and watching Star Wars movies.